Methods of obtaining Hydrogen

Hydrogen

Hydrogen is the lightest and most abundant chemical element, constituting roughly 75 % of the Universe’s elemental mass.^[4] Stars in the main sequence are mainly composed of hydrogen in its plasma state. Naturally occurring elemental hydrogen is relatively rare on Earth.

Hydrogen gas (now known to be H₂) was first artificially produced in the early 16th century, via the mixing of metals with strong acids. In 1766–81, Henry Cavendish was the first to recognize that hydrogen gas was a discrete substance, and that it produces water when burned, a property which later gave it its name, which in Greek means “water-former.” At standard temperature and pressure, hydrogen is acolorless, odorless, nonmetallic, tasteless, highly combustible diatomic gas with the molecular formula H₂.

Hydrogen is highly flammable and will burn in air at a very wide range of concentrations between 4% and 75% by volume.

Wikipedia Reference

Although you can’t collect hydrogen from the environment because it’s almost non-existent in our atmosphere(in natural state, because it’s very abundant in combination with other elements: water, for example ) there are numerous ways of producing it. No, you don’t need a chemistry laboratory at home to make your own hydrogen gas, you just need to improvise some equipment. Actually you don’t need to improvise at all if you just want to produce hydrogen for demonstration!

What can you use hydrogen for? Well, hehe, there are numerous applications if you are inventive. First of all, you can just have fun by setting it on fire while the reaction produces hydrogen. It will make small pops, or, if you have a nozzle, it will make a small beautiful flame. You can inflate a balloon and let it fly… or light it and it will wonderfully explode. You can make a water gun that throws water when hydrogen explodes in a “combustion chamber” as described here.

I’m going to post some methods of producing hydrogen at home, and probably provide some examples from external links.

With acids

You can prepare hydrogen through the reaction of acids with metals. It’s like this:

2HR+2M=>2MR+H2

“H” is hydrogen, “R” is the acid radical(example for sulfuric acid: SO4, so the acid is H2SO4) and “M” is the metal. So what acids and metals you can use at home?

For acids, you can use vinegar!(which is acetic acid btw, H3C-COOH ). On every bottle it must say the concentration. Most of the commercial vinegar is some around 5%, but the higher, the better. Of course you can use other acids. If you find any! You can actually use sulfuric acid found at hardware stores as “car battery electrolyte” but it is far to dangerous to play with.

For metals, you can probably find iron around the house. But even better, you can use zinc. You can get zinc from galvanized nails, or batteries.  It’s probably easier and faster to get it from batteries if you don’t find any galvanized nails, just peel of the metal casing from a zinc-carbon or alkaline battery, wash it, and you’ve got zinc metal.

For example, the reaction of zinc and vinegar goes like this:

2H3C-COOH+2Zn=>2H3C-COOZn+H2^

If you put the 2 ingredients in a transparent recipient( a glass for example), you will start seeing bubbles coming up from the zinc metal. If many bubbles form at the top, you can place near them a match and they will pop, because hydrogen explodes forming water.

Note that if you can find magnesium(Mg), the reaction will go even faster.

From water

You can make hydrogen through the electrolysis of water. Water electrolysis is also use at an industrial scale to produce both hydrogen and oxygen.

I actually did some water electrolysis myself and I posted on my blog: link. But I only did it for oxygen at that time, and I plan to do it for hydrogen as well.

It’s actually easy to do at home, all you need is to improvise a little apparatus. There are hundreds of explanations on the internet on how to do this, so I won’t bother to describe the method here(first of all, read that link from above on Wikipedia).

Some external links:

• Instructable on collecting hydrogen and oxygen
• A fun application of water electrolysis.
• Another instructable

Other methods

There are other methods as well, but I’m not going to describe them here because they’re not really possible to do at home, and some of them are dangerous.

One more way to make hydrogen at home is by mixing Caustic Soda(NaOH) with water and then adding sheets of alluminium foil. It’s a rather dangerous experiment, which I made myself.

Link to my experiment

View it directly on youtube.

If you want to make hydrogen by using the last method I showed you, please be cautious. It can be extremely dangerous. For safer production please use the water electrolysis method. It is much more safe.

Hydrogen can be fun if you manage to control it(that is “to store” it, to not let it escape).’

Have fun and be safe !

Hydrogen making, the exothermic way! :)

Recently I discovered a method of producing Hydrogen, using a faster method than electrolysis. This is the reaction:

2Al+2NaOH+6H2O=>2NaAl(OH)4+3H2

I described it in the previous post.

Today I filmed it. So here’s how to make hydrogen from NaOH, aluminum and water.

Watch it HD on youtube.

The video is actually only 3 minutes long! I left from mistake a part of the song later in the video and forgot about it. So when the video is half-streamed, it’s actually all ready to play

In other news, today it’s 21st June. It’s the summer solstice! Yay ! Or not yay? Now the night will grow and the day will shrink . Anyway, I’m beginning to feel the vacation. Happy summer to everybody!

Dangerous Hydrogen Making Experiment

Yesterday I discovered a faster, simpler way of producing hydrogen without all that electrolysis hustle. I hope I can get my hands on some NaOH tomorrow, because NaOH+H2O+Al=> lots of heat and H2 and other substances that are hard to write(something like NaAl(OH) but I may be wrong). I just put them in a bottle, then cover the bottle with a balloon! How cool is that?

Sodium Hydroxide(NaOH)

Well, I was at my grandmother today and I found out she had some old NaOH from some time ago when she made soap. It was nearly rock solid, so I could only scratch some NaOH from that rock. I didn’t make the above experiment(I plan on doing it tomorrow), instead I made something… “bombastic”.

So this is what I did: Placed NaOH in a 0,5l glass bottle half-filled with warm water, then quickly added some aluminium foil. Shaked the bottle a little bit and the reaction started immediately. It started making a lot of H2 and foam, but it wasn’t sufficient for what I wanted(I placed only a small quantity of NaOH)- a continuous flame coming from the mouth of the bottle.
So instead I placed a cover on the bottle’s mouth- hydrogen built up inside. After about 1 minute, I took the cover and came near with a match.

I wasn’t expecting that: it exploded into a flame about 20 cm high(the flame could be seen even inside the bottle) with a loud bang. It really scared the crap

Alluminium foil

out of me, and I wonder what would’ve happened if I let the hydrogen build more in quantity… I really feel lucky that bottle didn’t explode.I guess things like this increase our experience so next time we are much more cautious.

So anyway, tomorrow I’m going to buy some balloons and fill them with hydrogen .

And btw,  I found the reaction equation, it is this:

2Al+2NaOH+6H2O=>2NaAl(OH)4+3H2

Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, making up 75% of normal matter by mass and over 90% by number of atoms

Making Oxygen(first attempt)

Daca nu stiti engleza, incercati acest translator

OK so I decided to make a simple apparatus for making oxygen from electrolysis. I also made hydrogen during this experiment, but I didn’t collect it. The bothering thing was that it took 8 hours(!!!) to fill just a quarter of my small collecting “tank” ( which is a jar btw…).

Secondery products, in smaller quantities, were chlorine gas and , I think, Na that combined with water resulting NaOH. I’m not pretty sure about this though. I plan redoing this next week when I’ll make the anode( the electrode where the oxygen is producing) better- I’ll increase its surface.

But until then whatch the video . You’ll see at the final of the video what cool effect has oxygen over super heated wood.